The Smashing Pumpkins - Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun.

I’ll be honest, I’ve only ever really been a casual fan of The Smashing Pumpkins; I’ve enjoyed the big shoegazy alternative rock and grunge of albums like Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness for the open soulfulness the band brought to the table. However, the band have made it their mission to experiment with ideas that don’t always seem fully formed, leading to the perception that their success belongs with their one original style. And for personal gripes, I’ve only ever been able to tolerate Billy Corgan’s nasal-y voice in limited doses and in certain contexts. At their best, the band were able to wield a tremendous symphony of sounds with exquisite finesse to tap into unknown wells of emotions, but at their worst, combinations of lack of inspiration, lack of know-how, and clumsiness have led to more clunky albums like Zeitgeist. Nevertheless, I was at least curious about what would manifest from the more fully reunited “classic” line-up of the band, and I can say that it’s not too bad, but it is kind of hit-or-miss.
The unusually short album starts off unsteadily with the heavily string-supported “Knights of Malta”, which features this odd, subtle “woah woah” melody that persists throughout the track as kind of a distraction more than a main feature. The backing gospel choir vocals and Corgan’s trade-off with them are well-orchestrated and nicely harmonized, making me wish they were the main focus of the song. In fact, the piano and guitars across the track are pretty tastfully weaved in to the mix and make for a grand and well-tempered intro.
The second track, “Silvery Sometimes (Ghosts)”, takes the album in a symphonic time machine straight back to the 1990’s with the alternative rock guitars strumming away as Corgan sings his heart out with strings heightening the theatrical feel of the song. The next track, “Travels”, took me some time to warm up to for how cheesily 90’s-alt-rock and dream-pop it sounds, but its “where I belong” refrain is actually pretty soulful and Corgan’s delivery is tangibly heartfelt.
The lead single, “Solara”, follows with an odd combination of 90’s alt-grunge distorted guitar and chromatic vocal melody that makes me wonder what exactly the band was trying to accomplish with the song. It sounds like they’re clearly trying to revive their more metallic side and make something grungily bombastic, but the song is one of those examples of the band at their clumsiest. The riffs are simplistic and jumbled together with some truly messy drum work into a weird haze of grunge nostalgia that leads nowhere. The following song, “Alienation”, brings some partial redemption with its soulful and well-harmonized titular refrain, but it’s another track that tries to pump up a rather feeble skeleton of a song with big swells of strings and not much else to back it up.
The band try to go a little harder and faster again on “Marchin’ On”, which sounds awkward as hell and weirdly (but thankfully) truncated at two and a half minutes. The song “With Sympathy” brings the album back to the band’s strengths with some more shimmering orchestral, alternative rockin’ dream pop.
The closing track “Seek and You Shall Destroy” ends the album with a fine climax of heavy guitar instrumentation and theatrical string arrangements to bring everything together fancifully and conclusively at least by the album’s end. It’s probably the best song on the album, and I wish the whole thing was this confident and expressive.
As a more fair-weather fan of the band, I was pleasantly surprised with both the diversity of styles and the recapturing of some of the emotive energy that made The Smashing Pumpkins famous on the best tracks of this album. But there are also quite a few duds in the track list that stumble into the band’s usual pitfalls and suggest a lack of a coherent artistic direction. The title suggests a second installment is to come, but I don’t really know how much I’m looking forward to it if this album is any indication of where they’re going, because it still sounds like a band just wandering about and trying their hand at a few new things, but always coming back to home base to be safe.

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